The story told by Bill and Joe over the dinner-table was long and involved with many interruptions and many repetitions. According to them, there had always been people living on the assembled wreckage. The one of their number who had been there longest—for twenty-five years—knew personally others before him who had been there for as long again, and declared that these in turn knew of still others who had been there before them. It seemed very probable that the colony—if such a name could be applied to it—had existed for centuries.
The people, like the ships, had always come and never gone; once on the wrecks, they had stayed there till they died. Several of those now there had been born on the wrecks, and had lived there all their lives. Fresh wrecks brought them food, water, clothing, and many luxuries, and if these failed, there were abundant rain, birds’ eggs, and fish to fall back upon. Mostly sailors, trained to handiness, the castaways had developed many lines of industry, and, on the whole, lived very contentedly.
“Some of us is willing to live here always,” said Joe, “an’ some ain’t—especially at first. But, Lord love ye, they comes round to it after a while, seein’ they’ve got to.”
The castaways, it seemed, had developed a sort of government, under a former ship captain named Peter Forbes, whose ascendency rested partly on the fact that his strength enabled him to overcome everyone who contested the leadership with him, and partly on his native ability. Under his rule, stores were collected from the newly arrived ships and carried, sometimes from miles away, to what may be called the village—the central point where the castaways lived. A patrol—Joe and Bill, at present—was maintained, which made regular trips for fifty miles in each direction, investigating such new wrecks as might come in. The patrol only went as far as fifty miles in order to pick up any new arrivals, it being impracticable to transport stores more than a few miles over the ragged surface of the wreckage, even by swinging them on an aerial trolley from mast to mast.
Forbes divided up the work, and saw that each individual did his share. He also acted as a fount of justice, settling disputes in a rough-and-ready fashion, and, on occasion, dealing out punishments, more or less severe, for infractions of the rules he had laid down. Altogether, he seemed such an exceptional sort of man that Howard could not understand why he had made no effort to escape to shore.
Bill tried to make things clear. “You see, sir,” he explained, “it’s like this: This here weed stretches out for two hundred miles and more. We’d first have to build a boat, and then cut our way through it inch by inch. We couldn’t get grub or water enough in the boat to last us till we got out. An’ if we did get out, where’d we be? At sea without a compass or nothin’! We all wanted to try at first, but Forbes, he explains things to us so plain that we sees how impossible it is. Two or three times coves have tried to get out, but they allus got stuck in the weed, an’ mighty glad they was to get back to where there was plenty to eat and drink.”
Howard nodded. “I see the difficulty,” he conceded. “But have you no instruments? Of course there are not likely to be many, but I should think you would have found a few in all these years.”
Joe hesitated. “The cap’n allers looks out for them things,” he declared at last. “Nobody knows how to use ’em but him.”
“Ah! I see.”
To himself Howard added that it was tolerably evident that Forbes was not over-anxious to escape; probably he agreed with Cæsar that he “would rather be first in a little Iberian village than second in Rome”; and, contented with his little realm and sway, threw his influence against any attempt of the others to deplete it. Howard felt that he and Forbes might come to a clash later on.